Via Ry, stories about McCain supporters slashing tires at Obama rallies and harassing Obama voters at the polls.
Seeing this made me think hard about this question: if Obama wins, and the Democrats become America's majority party, what will be the response of America's conservative movement? As Ezra Klein points out, an Obama victory means that conservatives will have lost their "last firewall" - white tribalism will no longer be enough to win national elections.
At that point, conservative will have a choice. They can ditch tribalism and go with ideology as a unifying force. That will be tough, because the Reagan ideology (that the government should regulate morality and pump up the military but leave the economy alone) has pretty much fallen apart; if they're going to continue to be a movement of ideas, conservatives are going to have to seriously retool. It won't be impossible, but it'll be hard.
The other choice for conservatives is to stick with tribalism. And since nativist Christian whites are losing their majority status (in the electorate; in the general population, they lost it long ago), sticking with tribalism will mean abandoning the democratic process. As soon as they start getting regularly trounced by the liberal big tent at the polls, conservatives are going to realize that majority rule is no longer something that benefits them.
In fact, they've already started to realize this. Vote suppression is already a robust element of Republican electoral strategy. Next is coming intimidation at polling places (see the video above). These techniques are common in African and Latin American countries. If we follow the third-world pattern, next will come armed mobs of young conservative thugs, the hiring of Blackwater-type security agencies to assist in voter intimidation and suppression ("poll security"), and a greater focus on regionalism (the "pro-America" parts of America).
And if we're really really unlucky, after that will come attempts to use the U.S. armed forces to stage a coup. Which sounds crazy when I write it, but it's what happens in a lot of other countries when a well-organized group loses its electoral majority status. It's what happened in Thailand. If you say it won't happen here, I think you're probably right, but if you say it couldn't happen here, I think you need to seriously reexamine your assumptions.
Conservatives are waking up to the fact that America's majoritarian democracy, which for many decades served their interests, is now working against their tribalist movement. They can choose to expand their ideological tent, or they can choose to chuck democracy and turn us into a banana republic. Which do you think they'll choose?
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